Food trail through Jasper, Lake Louise and Calgary in Canada

A travel article about food and landscape in Alberta. IN THE remote islands off Canada's east coast, I was given an old rule of survival: If you get lost in the forest, follow the bear tracks and eat what the bears eat, except skunk cabbage. There was no second rule for what to do about the bear, should he also appear. No matter. "Do this and you'll live," it says, "just as we did in the past."...

Lessons from a Church Mural

A travel article about the Moselle Valley, Germany. There’s a school of thought that says you shouldn’t look back in life. This is not the received wisdom in Cochem, a village on the Moselle river known, like many others in the area, for its white wine and fairytale castle. Here, they say, it’s bad luck if you don’t turn around for one last look at a mural of St Christopher that graces the castle’s main tower...

eHealth and the modern society

The integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into healthcare processes “eHealth” is driving enormous change in healthcare delivery and productivity. The transformations empower patients and present opportunities for new synergies between healthcare professionals, clinical decision makers, policy makers and educators. Technologies that are directly driving changes include Tele-medicine, Electronic health records (EHR), Standards to ensure computer systems inter-operate, Decision support systems, Data mining and easy access to medical information. This workshop provides an introduction to key informatics initiatives in eHealth using real examples and suggests how applications can be applied to modern society.

Follow the lighthouse route in Nova Scotia, Canada

Within half an hour of leaving Halifax Airport I managed to get myself lost. I noticed an exit sign for St Margaret’s Bay and, despite written instructions to the contrary, it sounded like the right way to go. But I was on the Lighthouse Route and on my way back to Halifax...

Suicide and religion : new evidence on the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism

Suicide has remained a persistent social phenomenon and now accounts for more deaths than motor vehicle accidents. There has been much debate, however, over which religious constructs might best explain the variation in suicide rates. Our empirical analysis reveals that even though theological and social differences between Catholicism and Protestantism have decreased, Catholics are still less likely than Protestants to commit or accept suicide. This difference holds even after we control for such confounding factors as social and religious networks. In addition, although religious networks do mitigate suicides among Protestants, the influence of church attendance is more dominant among Catholics. Our analysis also indicates that alternative concepts such as religious commitment and religiosity strongly reduce suicide acceptance.

Fred’s Flow (Canada) and Murphy Well (Australia) : thick komatiitic lava flows with contrasting compositions, emplacement mechanisms and water contents

Two Archaean komatiitic flows, Fred’s Flow in Canada and the Murphy Well Flow in Australia, have similar thicknesses (120 and 160 m) but very different compositions and internal structures. Their contrasting differentiation profiles are keys to determine the cooling and crystallization mechanisms that operated during the eruption of Archaean ultramafic lavas. Fred’s Flow is the type example of a thick komatiitic basalt flow. It is strongly differentiated and consists of a succession of layers with contrasting textures and compositions. The layering is readily explained by the accumulation of olivine and pyroxene in a lower cumulate layer and by evolution of the liquid composition during downward growth of spinifex-textured rocks within the upper crust. The magmas that erupted to form Fred’s Flow had variable compositions, ranging from 12 to 20 wt% MgO, and phenocryst contents from 0 to 20 vol%. The flow was emplaced by two pulses. A first ~20-m-thick pulse was followed by another more voluminous but less magnesian pulse that inflated the flow to its present 120 m thickness. Following the second pulse, the flow crystallized in a closed system and differentiated into cumulates containing 30–38 wt% MgO and a residual gabbroic layer with only 6 wt% MgO. The Murphy Well Flow, in contrast, has a remarkably uniform composition throughout. It comprises a 20-m-thick upper layer of fine-grained dendritic olivine and 2–5 vol% amygdales, a 110–120 m intermediate layer of olivine porphyry and a 20–30 m basal layer of olivine orthocumulate. Throughout the flow, MgO contents vary little, from only 30 to 33 wt%, except for the slightly more magnesian basal layer (38–40 wt%). The uniform composition of the flow and dendritic olivine habits in the upper 20 m point to rapid cooling of a highly magnesian liquid with a composition like that of the bulk of the flow. Under equilibrium conditions, this liquid should have crystallized olivine with the composition Fo94.9, but the most magnesian composition measured by electron microprobe in samples from the flow is Fo92.9. To explain these features, we propose that the parental liquid contained around 32 wt% MgO and 3 wt% H2O. This liquid degassed during the eruption, creating a supercooled liquid that solidified quickly and crystallized olivine with non-equilibrium textures and compositions.

Globalisation and national curriculum reform in Australia : the push for Asia literacy

This chapter explores the policy context for the push for a national curriculum and the inclusion of Asia literacy for schooling in Australia in the light of current links between globalisation, education and policy analysis and the notion of the learning/knowledge society of the twenty-first century. It is anticipated that discussion of the Australian context will be insightful for those other nations concerned with positioning Asia in school curricula, including for example, New Zealand, Canada, USA and UK. In doing so, the chapter considers the challenges to the implementation of Asia literacy in Australia with specific reference to current and future teachers for, as with many nations, the teaching profession in Australia is on the cusp of generational change as large numbers of teachers aged in their mid to late fifties embark on retirement (Teaching Australia, 2007). A major challenge in addressing these demographic shifts in Australia, lies with meeting the demand for replacement teachers and preparing future teachers (Skilbeck, & Connell, 2004; McKenzie, 2012) with Asia-related knowledge.

Male sex work and society

This collection explores male sex work from an array of perspectives and disciplines. It aims to help enrich the ways in which we view both male sex work as a field of commerce and male sex workers themselves. Leading contributors examine the field both historically and cross-culturally from fields including public health, sociology, psychology, social services, history, filmography, economics, mental health, criminal justice, geography, and migration studies, and more. Synthesizing introductions by the editors help the reader understand the implications of the findings and conclusions for scholars, practitioners, students, and members of the interested/concerned public.

Key Concepts in Crime and Society

This book is an introduction to key issues in the area of crime as it connects to society. The book is divided into three parts: Understanding Crime and Criminality: introduces topics such as the social construction of crime and deviance, social control, the fear of crime, poverty and exclusion, white collar crime, victims of crime, race/gender and crime. Types of Crime and Criminality: explores examples including human trafficking, sex work, drug crime, environmental crime, cyber crime, war crime, terrorism, and interpersonal violence. Responses to Crime: looks at areas such as crime and the media, policing, moral panics, deterrence, prisons and rehabilitation.

The feasibility of a community pharmacy delivered in-pharmacy influenza vaccination service

Pharmacist-administered vaccination is a reality in many counties including USA, Canada, UK, Portugal, Ireland and New Zealand. In Australia the role of pharmacist administered vaccination has long been supported by the profession particularly the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia and Pharmacy Guild of Australia, however legislation prohibits this practice in each state and territory. In 2013 the only available in-pharmacy vaccination services are those delivered by an immunization nurse, nurse practitioner or general practitioner.

Reason of state and a new notion of fortune : Historicising the risk society

Since the 1980s the concept of risk has produced a large and diverse volume of sociological research. Ulrich Beck’s groundbreaking risk society thesis provides a particularly engaging contribution, since it seems that nearly every sociological account of risk engages with this work. For Beck, we are living in second modernity – a new epoch that breaks with pre-modernity and industrial society due to the centrality, incalculability and reflexivity of globalised risk. While Beck’s theory is compelling, a reading of other theorists such as Foucault (2007[1978]) and Hacking (1975,1990) suggests that a difficulty with Beck’s work is that in attempting to explain what is novel about risk in contemporary times, he too quickly passes over the complexities and ruptures of historical change that impact on the history and contingency of risk. This paper begins by presenting a brief analysis of the present state of risk by introducing Beck’s historical narrative of risk from pre-modernity to the risk society; it then outlines the challenges with the “risk as epoch” argument by considering a range of literature, which suggests risk has a more complex history than proposed by Beck; and finally it highlights the value in examining strategies of statecraft in early modern Europe, specifically Machiavelli’s The Prince (2008[1513]) and Giovanni Botero’s political treatise, Della Ragion di Stato (1956[1589]) – as a means of more thoroughly understanding how our current concept of risk emerges. In doing so, this paper seeks to open up new trajectories in the historicisation of risk for other interested scholars.

A novel tuning method for advanced line drop compensator and its application to response coordination of distributed generation with voltage regulating devices

Nowadays, integration of small-scale electricity generators, known as Distributed Generation (DG), into distribution networks has become increasingly popular. This tendency together with the falling price of DG units has a great potential in giving the DG a better chance to participate in voltage regulation process, in parallel with other regulating devices already available in the distribution systems. The voltage control issue turns out to be a very challenging problem for distribution engineers, since existing control coordination schemes need to be reconsidered to take into account the DG operation. In this paper, a control coordination approach is proposed, which is able to utilize the ability of the DG as a voltage regulator, and at the same time minimize the interaction of DG with another DG or other active devices, such as On-load Tap Changing Transformer (OLTC). The proposed technique has been developed based on the concepts of protection principles (magnitude grading and time grading) for response coordination of DG and other regulating devices and uses Advanced Line Drop Compensators (ALDCs) for implementation. A distribution feeder with tap changing transformer and DG units has been extracted from a practical system to test the proposed control technique. The results show that the proposed method provides an effective solution for coordination of DG with another DG or voltage regulating devices and the integration of protection principles has considerably reduced the control interaction to achieve the desired voltage correction.